Opinion:
Top money managers are turning to gold — should you?

Bullion bulls now outnumber bears, an astonishing improvement

The world’s top money managers have hated gold bullion for almost as long as anyone’s been asking them.

But not anymore.

With China wobbling, Europe in turmoil and the price of bullion down to multi-year lows, the long-running gold skeptics running the world’s biggest investment funds have suddenly and dramatically turned on to its appeal.

“Gold is undervalued” at around $1,155 an ounce, say a small majority of managers, according to the latest Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey. Bulls outnumber bears by only 1 percentage point, but the improvement shows an astonishing change from the most recent past, when the gold skeptics formed a clear majority.

The survey is significant. Bank of America Merrill Lynch spoke to around 150 top investment honchos around the world who manage about $400 billion in assets.

Gold has certainly come down a long way — and especially in relation to other financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. As our chart shows, gold bullion is now at its lowest level compared with the world’s stock markets since before the Lehman Brothers collapse.

Money managers have traditionally been bearish of gold. Merrill Lynch has been asking them about it for 12 years (following a suggestion from this writer) and for almost all of that time they said it was overvalued — even as the price rose steadily, from 2003 to 2011, from less than $400 an ounce to nearly $2,000.

The last time they were bullish was in 2009, says Merrill — just before it began skyrocketing.

Few assets generate as much controversy as gold.

Modern finance says it’s effectively valueless as an investment, because it generates no cash flow. Warren Buffett wondered why we would dig it out of the ground in, say, Africa simply in order to bury it in a vault somewhere else. Some argue the gold market is effectively a (legal) Ponzi scheme, because today’s investors can only earn a profit from money supplied by new investors. They say gold’s boom last decade was mainly caused by the creation of exchange traded funds, such as the SPDR Gold Shares
GLD
which made it easier for investors to pour money into the bullion market.

But fans of the precious metal say it’s the oldest currency in existence and a long-standing “safe haven” and “store of value.” It’s also portable, fungible, anonymous and limited in quantity, implying that as the world’s central banks print more and more paper money, the value of gold (and land and diamonds and so on) probably ought to rise in relation.

Many moderate gold fans also argue that adding some bullion — somewhere between 5% to 10% — to a portfolio can reduce the overall volatility, as gold has frequently performed differently from other assets. That’s been true for most of the past 50 years, but past performance, as the financial disclosures always remind us, is no guarantee of future results. Gold was abandoned as official money in 1973 and it’s hard to compare valuations today with valuations then.

Nonetheless, gold has certainly become cheaper and cheaper in recent years, especially in relative terms. Since 2011 — around the time current presidential candidate Donald Trump turned bullish of gold, as it happens — gold has fallen about 40% in U.S. dollar terms. Meanwhile, stocks and bonds have boomed to new highs. So it isn’t completely crazy to think that maybe you should sell a little of what’s gone up to buy a little of what’s gone down.